It is current practice to raise pigs and other livestock in houses to optimize growth and fattening up of the animals. These houses typically have a concrete floor with narrow slots therethrough which allow excrement and other waste to fall through the floor to a trough. This provides the pigs with a cleaner environment and reduced exposure to disease and infection. The slots are generally narrow along the upper surface and wider near the bottom to reduce potential clogging of the slots. The waste may be collected in the trough for subsequent use such as fertilizer, etc. The concrete floor comprises a series of floor sections which are molded at a remote location and are placed side by side to form a floor with a continuous grid of equally spaced slots.
Conventional apparatus for molding each floor section is a mold or form having dividers in the shape of the slots extending upright from the base of the mold. Concrete is poured into the mold and the top surface is continuously worked and smoothed over a period of time to form a smooth upper surface. This is very labor intensive and requires substantial time, effort and skill to obtain the desired finish.
To avoid the extensive labor costs involved in working the upper surface of the concrete, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,915,422, 3,982,874, 4,119,691 and 4,168,820 to Nobbe disclose mold arrangements for producing the concrete slotted floor sections in an inverted orientation. The base of the mold provides the top of the floor section with a smooth surface without the costly hand working and smoothing of the surface. The bottom of the floor section, which is upward in the mold should be leveled, but does not need to be smoothed like the upper surface. Thus there is a reduction in labor costs for forming the floor sections.
The Nobbe patents, however, have not produced a fully satisfactory arrangement for molding the floor sections. The Nobbe apparatus is a lightweight wooden apparatus producing smaller than conventional sized floor sections. This design would not be suitable for repeated or continuous commercial use for conventional sized floor sections without extensively strengthening and rigidifying the design. For example, the upright dividers are mounted to a series of cross supports which hold the dividers down to the base of the mold. In a conventional size, the cross support would extend approximately twice the span shown by Nobbe. After repeated use, the weight of the concrete pushing upwardly against the dividers may weaken the cross supports and allow a space to form between the base of the mold and the divider. This space would naturally get filled with concrete and the molded floor section would therefore have slots which are closed. Such floor sections are unsatisfactory and must be discarded as waste. Clearly, the cost of such wasted floor sections would be expensive.
Accordingly it is an object of the present invention to provide a molding apparatus for molding slotted concrete floor sections in an inverted position and which is constructed to withstand repeated commercial use and includes means for effectively holding the dividers down to the base of the mold and avoid the problems of the prior art as noted above.